March to the Sound of the Guns: Organizational Integration for Strategic Competition

Over the last eighteen months, the United States government has drastically overhauled its foreign influence establishment. Amidst this reorganization, the United States (U.S.) Army has an opportunity to build new structures that might ensure decisive military influence support to political warfare. Army doctrine requires shaping the environment in such a way as to create conditions that deter attack or, in the face of naked aggression, enable the enemy’s defeat. Our doctrine leaves us without mechanical focal points for influence operations in that context, however. Below we identify third country decisions as potential decisive points, but we also expose a dilemma: the key terrain in military competition is rarely seized by a military actor. Fortunately, structures evolved to conduct close air support (CAS) offer a solution. By placing information warfare professionals in State Department Regional Bureaus and at key Embassies, where ‘the fight’ is during the strategic competition phase of conflict, the Army better aligns military support within Kennan’s “employment of all the means at a nation’s command, short of war, to achieve its national objectives.”

The contemporary competitive environment finds the majority of operations occurring on the lower end of the spectrum of violence where U.S. dominance in lethality loses some of its benefits. Our adversaries commit more resources to influence efforts than the United States’ body politic has elected to counter them, while malign actors and their proxies often have more flexibility than U.S. institutions. With each passing moment, there are new actors, outlets, and narratives—many capable of their own global effects—appearing in the environment, while allied resources cannot be committed at a commensurate rate. Simultaneously, ubiquitous global surveillance has drastically altered the way all actors sense and act. Any attempts to cope with such difficult, nebulous conditions require triage and organizational forms that enable unified and precise actions.

On Doctrinal Ambiguity

Nonetheless, doctrinal literature fails to provide adequate functional models for integrating information operations into strategic competition.

With these difficult conditions, we must ask questions like ‘what should influence achieve?’ or ‘how should we measure strategic influence in a challenging competitive space?’ When in doubt, military professionals consult their doctrine. The proverbial manual on influence would suggest that, Army forces seek relative advantages at the strategic/theater, operational, and tactical levels during strategic competition. This book also tells us that the theater-level headquarters are the only echelon with a sufficient foreign presence to enable continuous shaping in conjunction with a wide variety of interagency, intergovernmental, and multinational partners. Shaping operations conducted prior to hostilities – sometimes called operational preparation of the environment (OPE) – include many forms of influence; these deep operations both help establish the friendly theater as well as disrupt the structures and systems that might enable the enemy’s operational approaches and set favorable terms for armed conflict should deterrence fail.

Nonetheless, doctrinal literature fails to provide adequate functional models for integrating information operations into strategic competition. We have conceptual frames like shaping, OPE, or deep operations, but other than an adversary’s theoretical use-of-force decision, there is no mechanical focus for actions “short of armed conflict”. We have a vast menu of means in this space: key leader engagement (KLE), public affairs (PA), psychological operations (PSYOP), theater security cooperation (TSC), non-intelligence technical effects, civil-military operations (CMO), etc., but no central model against which to plan.

Strategic Clarity and Operational Dissonance

In ground combat, we have clear mental models of how combined arms should seize key terrain, exploit key events, or affect vital functions that, “when acted upon, [enable] commanders to gain a marked advantage over an enemy or contribute materially to achieving success”.  These are so-called decisive points and our latest Army doctrine on “convergence” holds that we pursue all available opportunities to achieve them, iteratively: taking a piece of key terrain or destroying a particular enemy capability. The question becomes: when not engaged in lethal combat, what are the decisive points around which we should plan?

The points at which foreign perceptions, behaviors, and decisions can have the highest military value are those surrounding topics like access, basing, and overflight (ABO) and military supply chains. Those decisions are the metaphorical hill to seize or enemy formation to destroy and, therefore, enable commanders to clearly articulate plans.

In the conduct of OPE to shape the environment during competition, it is the decisions of key selectorates in third countries that affect theater posture which provide the most salient decisive points to campaigning. Senior leaders and their staffs often couch discussions of competition in foreign public perceptions. However, foreign public understanding of a geostrategic issue relevant to competition may be limited and, even if perceived, ephemeral. Additionally, broad public opinion is always contingent on unexpected events and is often disconnected from a nation’s policy choices. Governing declarations (often written agreements, but occasionally spoken policy), are less fleeting and more tangible than popular sentiment, though certainly still affected by the public.

OPE for influence is best conceived as a form of contact and maneuver to be commanded using the aforementioned means (PSYOP, PA, TSC…) to shape perceptions, behaviors, and decision making of peoples relevant to a military objective. But in competition, which decisions do we target? The points at which foreign perceptions, behaviors, and decisions can have the highest military value are those surrounding topics like access, basing, and overflight (ABO) and military supply chains. Those decisions are the metaphorical hill to seize or enemy formation to destroy and, therefore, enable commanders to clearly articulate plans. The people who decide on whether to make those declarations – the internal selectorates who agree to the policy – are the essential “targets”.

While perhaps uncomfortable, the War Department’s means must integrate with diplomatic ways to serve military ends for successful competition.

Campaigning for friendly geostrategic positions (bases, routes, and/or supply chains) during competition is a bloodless yet vital battle to limit or erode adversary options, create or preserve friendly advantages, and increase an adversary’s doubts both before and after the opponent’s decision to escalate. Steering these decisions to favor one side allows the winning competitor to gain a marked advantage over its adversary or contributes materially to achieving campaign success, either singularly or collectively over time. Amidst a nebulous environment, concentrating on a specific set of these decisions narrows the scope of threat behaviors, targeted audiences, contested narratives, and evaluation metrics around which to direct resources.

Unfortunately, there is a dilemma that comes with this clarity: culminating most of those decisive points, short of armed conflict, does not lie within the exclusive purview of military forces. Instead, the diplomat is the decisive actor in strategic competition, as they lead negotiations in most of the spaces mentioned above. Also, Title 22 paragraph 3927 of US Code gives Department of State Chiefs of Mission de facto authority over military forces deployed outside a declared theater of armed conflict. While perhaps uncomfortable, the War Department’s means must integrate with diplomatic ways to serve military ends for successful competition. Fortunately, the U.S. military has previously figured out how to enable a decisive actor from outside a particular force’s authoritative domain.

Uncomfortable Coordination

Land force commanders have long understood infantry forces as the ‘principal arm’ of combat operations. After the first World War, where air power emerged as a significant arm of battle, infantrymen remain the decisive actor in ground combat. Despite this, air domain leaders in the interwar period placed ground support much lower in their priorities, instead preferencing missions like air superiority or strategic bombing. Though the second World War and Korea taught lots of lessons on the value of CAS, the cultural preference for dogfighting and deep strike left the Air Force fundamentally unprepared for unconventional battlefields. The pressure of Vietnam forced a new level of interservice control for air support to ground operations, manifested in today’s Theater Air Control System/Army Air Ground System (TACS/AAGS), with cross service memoranda and inclusion in doctrine.

The key adaptations of TACS/AAGS are the Air Support Operation Center (ASOC) and Tactical Air Control Party (TACP). At the Brigade level and above, the former is located with ground forces and serves as the primary control agency for airpower directly supporting land operations. The latter, centered on the Joint Terminal Attack Controller (JTAC), provides air liaison to tactical land elements for the direct control of aircraft. The ASOC brings bomb-laden aircraft to the fight and the JTAC accompanies tactical commanders (the authority for assessing risk to ground forces) to guide the dropping of said bombs. The work is high risk but high reward, placing aircraft closer to ground fire and troops close to exploding ordnance but often turning the tide of battles and saving friendly lives.

Get to Where the Fight is

Military influence coordinators lashed into diplomatic institutions might vastly improve how we establish strategic advantage, by changing and maintaining certain decisive conditions.

The risks of strategic competition, though political, are often quite high. Military forces have a vast array of resources to turn the tide, but little of the authority required to use them – just like air forces conducting CAS. Military commanders might prefer to focus on their domain, but hard realities bring them to uncomfortable requirements. Paralleling CAS doctrine, military influence tools “should be used at decisive points” in competition, “should normally be massed to apply concentrated” pressure to shape foreign agreements. Also analogous to CAS, military influence in competition requires intense coordination and precision by all parties involved. Detailed integration of military and diplomatic components must be a feature of political warfare, combining information effects and negotiation into a single effort. Finally, the CAS metaphor tells us that joint elements must be co-located to concentrate influence resources and enable terminal coordination “in response to rapidly changing tactical circumstances”. The best place for this is not necessarily inside a combatant command or service component headquarters; military influence coordinators should be in the Department of State’s Regional Bureaus (like an ASOC) and at select Embassies (like JTACs). Strategic competition finds diplomats in the decisive fight; the military must march to support.

Existing networks of State Department Political Advisors and military attaches, while critical, are not trained or enabled to answer the unconventional requirements of today’s influence competition. Military influence coordinators lashed into diplomatic institutions might vastly improve how we establish strategic advantage, by changing and maintaining certain decisive conditions. Acknowledging that military actors rarely culminate the decisive points in competition—third country decisions—we can adapt structures similar to those used for CAS to provide military support to political warfare. Military planners assigned to the Combatant Command but attached to the State Department will enable the joint force to converge efforts to shape the informational environment and empower diplomats in the physical places and thematic spaces which are most vital to our geostrategic aims. Go to where the ‘fight’ is, even if the field is not yours to command.

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